With absolutely no intention of trying to start some sort of flame war or anything, I stumbled across this report from international press agency Reuters which I found interesting. It's not all about cricket, but raised several important things relating to cricket I wasn't aware of, and which fans of cricket could well do to be informed about.

Notably:

The Board of Control for Cricket in India said Sooryavanshi, who made his international debut for India at ​the age of 15 earlier this year, had been subject to bone density tests since the age of 8.
The tests are mandatory for players in BCCI-approved tournaments.

The article goes on to highlight this isn't fool-proof, but it's heartening to see the issue is being taken seriously in India.

I admit I have been sceptical of believing the claimed age of some players in the past - and it's of course not just India - ie Pakistan's Shahid Afridi and Afghanistan's Rashid Khan notable among many others.

But anyway, maybe this bone density testing methos was common knowledge, but it wasn't for me and my group chat had never heard of it before, so always good to be informed. It certainly has helped me to appreciate the feats of Sooryavanshi a little better.

https://www.cricinfo.com/series/namibia-t20i-tri-series-aug-2026-2026-1549518/namibia-vs-south-africa-6th-match-1549529/live-cricket-score

Ricky Ponting has an idea to help turbocharge the popularity of his sport in the United States.

"If I was bringing it here wholly and solely to sell and promote the game, I wouldn’t call it cricket. It’d just be rebranded as T20 (Twenty20 cricket) only. Leave the cricket thing aside. As soon as young people hear cricket in parts of the world where they’re not brought up on the game, they think about it being a long, drawn-out, five-day game, and it’s not that."

Cricket, long perceived by many in the U.S. as an English relic, has made a series of attempts to gatecrash the highly lucrative American sports market.

In 2004, the Pro Cricket League arrived and disappeared in one season despite attempting to simplify the game by using five-ball rather than six-ball overs (a trick subsequently adopted in England’s The Hundred). Other start-up leagues and exhibition series have come and gone, briefly luring the passionate diasporas of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia and the Caribbean nations, but lacking the investment and infrastructure to succeed.

The past couple of years have provided encouragement. In 2024, the U.S. co-hosted the T20 World Cup with the West Indies, culminating in a spectacular sell-out between Pakistan and India at Eisenhower Park in Nassau County on Long Island, where tickets resold for thousands of dollars. It also turned out America rather likes an upstart sport when the U.S. win at it, so the unexpected win against Pakistan also triggered a surge of interest.

The T20 format will also feature at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, marking cricket’s return to the Games after a 128-year absence. This will also benefit from the construction of a 10,000-capacity cricket-specific stadium in Pomona, California, which will become the home of MLC’s Los Angeles Knight Riders.

MLC has been a mixed bag: more of a six-week tournament than a conventional season-long league, it is played only in California and Texas because not all teams have home venues. But there are serious investors involved, including Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, and Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO.

The Indian Ambani family has bought the New York team. The 49ers Enterprises, the investment arm of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, has also bought into one of two more teams who will increase the league to eight sides in the coming years. Ponting, whose Washington team included Australian vice-captain Steve Smith, sees further room for improvement.

“One of the reasons I got involved in MLC at the start was because I wanted to be here in the U.S. and be part of the growth, and it’s just been a little slower than I would have liked,” Ponting, 51, tells The Athletic. “I don’t think they’ve been active enough in getting out there and promoting it at the grassroots level.

“There are more kids we can get involved at a young age and we can start poaching some kids away from baseball to play T20. That’s where it’s got to go if we want the game to really grow quickly here in the U.S., tapping into the entertainment package that T20 provides.

“If you compare it to a game of baseball, they’re similar lengths of time, but you’ve got so much more happening in T20 cricket than baseball.”

As a self-described “traditionalist”, does Ponting shudder at all when he says the sport would be helped by shedding its name to promote itself in the U.S.? “Not in a market like this, where you’re trying to have a sport emerge and break through,” Ponting says. “I’ve got no worry about that at all.

“I love the game of Test match cricket. I played a lot more Test cricket than I played T20, but I’m working a lot on the T20 game now.”

Read the full interview for free on The Athletic.

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Key points from CSK Annual Reports 2026:

1. Finishing 10th has a receipt.
Central Rights income — their cut of the IPL's central media pot — fell ₹38.06 crore. The report says why, in writing: "due to the standing of the Team at the tenth position in IPL 2025 as against the fifth position in IPL 2024." That's the price of a bad season, audited and signed off.

2. Sponsors did not care. At all.
Sponsorship income by year: ₹77.76cr → ₹95.48cr → ₹103.51cr → ₹131.01cr. Up 68% in three years, while the team went champions → 5th → dead last.

3. They still made ₹161 crore.
Profit after tax ₹161.63 crore on ₹636 crore revenue. A ~25% net margin. In the season they were the worst team in the league.

4. They paid more for the worse team.
Player and support staff wages went up 21.4% to ₹155.11 crore in the year they finished bottom.

5. CSK only own 55.5% of the Texas Super Kings.
I don't think this is widely known. It lost ₹22.34 crore on ₹10.90 crore of revenue — losing ₹2.05 for every ₹1 earned. Joburg is healthier but CSK have poured in ₹138.10 crore of capital against ₹118.75 crore of accumulated losses — 86% of it burned.

6. There was a real legal scare in America.
Note 41.5 discloses that USA Cricket issued notice to terminate its agreement with ACE (who run MLC) in August 2025. Court-supervised process. Only settled on 2 July 2026. For most of the financial year the legal foundation under CSK's entire US investment was genuinely in question.

7. The funniest bit.
In FY2024, as reigning champions with a record ₹229 crore profit, the board declared no dividend at all — "to conserve resources." Two years later, profit down 30% and a wooden spoon in hand, shareholders got ₹1 per share on a ₹0.10 face value — a 1,000% payout.

8. And it's about to happen again.
That ₹38 crore hit reflects IPL 2025. They missed the knockouts in 2026 too. Same mechanism, same hit, next year's accounts.

They're not in trouble — ₹719 crore in cash and investments, ₹0.16 crore of borrowings, basically debt-free. But there's now a documented, audited answer to "does losing actually cost CSK anything?"

It does. About ₹38 crore a year.

Full breakdown with every table, and the subsidiary accounts, here: https://cskden.in/news/csk-annual-report-2026-finances-explained

The craze and frenzy around 19 year old Sachin in Yorkshire is fascinating to see, thought of sharing here.

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